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Thursday, September 12, 2013

It was a Sunday like any other. After
catching up on some morning chores, I started reading the local paper. It was
September 14, 2008. Despite the headlines about Sarah Palin and the escalating
financial crisis, I remember being in a good mood.My girlfriend called. She was out and
about, driving around, and we chatted about this and that as I casually flipped
through the newspaper, skimming the articles. My girlfriend pulled up to a
drive-thru to get something to eat and asked if I wanted anything. I told her I
didn’t, and she said she’d call me back in a minute after she was done
ordering. I said “Ok” and we hung up, pleasantly enough.I turned what little attention I had
back to the newspaper. It really was a lazy Sunday, the kind of day when it’s
hard to focus on anything.I flipped to the obituaries. Gregory
Mcdonald, the writer of Fletch, had
died a week earlier and for some reason was given prominent space in that day’s
paper. His obit took up half the page, above the fold, and there was even a
picture of him. Uninterested, I started to turn the page over. Right before the
page disappeared from view, three familiar words caught my eye: “David Foster
Wallace.” I stopped. I remember being momentarily confused as to why his name
was in my local paper, and I think it was a half second later when I realized
it was positioned below Mcdonald’s obituary, this realization hitting me while
I was reading the complete headline, which stated in bold typeface: “David
Foster Wallace, 46, Found Dead.”And then my world went black.

It is December of 2006. I’ve made the
delightful discovery that the 10th Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest is a mere $10, cover price. This leads to a
no-brainer decision: I’m going to buy this book for everyone I know for
Christmas. And just like that I’m going around to all the bookstores in the
area (back then there were multiple options) and cleaning them out of all their
IJs. At a single Barnes & Noble,
I carry an armload of four up to the register. Lugging them back home, I put
them in stacks on my table, and the sight of all these IJs gives me great pleasure. I have serious doubts about whether
they’ll actually be read, but it amuses me to think that I’m distributing a
dangerous samizdat that will sit on
people’s shelves, dormant but dangerous, ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting
reader someday.

I buy a packet of smiley stickers and put
one on the cover of each book.

I didn’t pass out or anything like that. The
world went black because I had immediately shut my eyes. It was involuntary. I
did not consciously make a decision to close my eyes—it just happened. I had
never done anything like that before. In the past, I’d averted my eyes out of
embarrassment and anger, but never horror. I think it’s something people do,
though I’d never experienced it up until then. Days later, thinking about it, I
realized why people shut their eyes when they’ve just seen something horrible. I
think they’re trying to stop themselves from seeing what they’ve just seen. If
they close their eyes fast enough (the thinking goes), the light reflected from
whatever horrible thing they’ve just witnessed won’t reach their corneas, and
then it’ll be like the thing never happened. I think that’s what I was
attempting. I was trying to remain in a world where he was still alive—at least
as far as I knew—if only momentarily.

This attempt to insulate myself from the
truth failed utterly. Water built behind my eyelids and I felt a welling-up
inside me of something that started in my stomach and then enlarged like an
inflating balloon, and I felt it extend upward through my chest and into my
throat until finally I felt it at the back of my tongue, but it felt way too
large to exit my body and before I knew it I was gasping for air. In-between
taking big gulps of air, I was crying. Thinking about it later, I knew that I
was sobbing—crying so hard that it was hard to breathe. This was another thing
I’d never done before; I’d never been this physically affected by grief. This
push-and-pull continued for many minutes, my body wanting to expel so many
things at once while I gasped for enough air to keep breathing. It felt like
drowning without water.

Somewhere in this, I became aware that my
phone was ringing. It was my girlfriend. I answered it. The first thing she
heard was my sobs, and, instantly alarmed, she asked, frantically, what was
wrong. I told her that I had just read something…I think I put it as simply as
that: “I just read something.” It was obvious that it was bad, whatever it was.
She said What? I told her David Foster Wallace was dead. And saying it aloud like
that, of course I just broke down all over again.

It is early 2005. I want to get into reading
books. I’m not even sure why; I get in these moods sometimes. Anyways, I like
art. I’ve been watching a lot of movies and listening to a lot of music, and
now it just seems natural to get into reading books, specifically novels. It’s
not that I never read. I read occasionally, a novel here and there (mostly ones
that have been made into movies), but now I just really want to give them a
shot on their own terms or something. I want to be aware of what is going on in
the literary landscape, just like I am for movies and music.

The problem is I know nothing about
contemporary literature. So, as I often do, I turn to my friend, who is
inordinately more well-versed than me in all the art forms, but especially
literature. The guy devours books. He has books literally spilling out of his
room.

So I ask him, what contemporary authors are
doing great stuff these days? I put it to him this way: “What author would you
run out and get their book if it came out today?”

He considers it for a moment, then tells me
three names: Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve
never heard of any of them.

After doing a little Googling, Wallace
captures my attention the most. Powers and Vollmann are exceedingly prolific
and it’s hard to tell where to start with them. Wallace, on the other hand, has
only written two novels. And one of them, Infinite
Jest, is clearly the one. It’s
over a thousand pages. Even knowing nothing else about it, it looms over
everything else. It is an undeniable monster, beckoning to me during a time
when I found undeniability to be one of the most attractive qualities of good
art.

I circle around it a little, unsure whether
to take the plunge. I do a little more research. I become fascinated by the
fact that Wallace was only 34 when it was published. (He looks even younger in
the author photo.) I play coy with my intentions, asking my friend about it the
way you ask other people about your crush. I ask my friend one day, “What are
the chances you think I could finish Infinite
Jest?” (“Does she say anything about me?”) He takes a second, then says the
odds are pretty good, once I get into it. (I know now he was lying; the odds of
completing IJ are pretty bad for a
person like I was at the time, viz. someone who didn’t read much. But the
alternative is telling someone to not even bother, and I know I would never say that to anyone.)

I wait a couple more days, then decide on
the spur of the moment that I’m actually going to do it. I’m going to attempt
to read Infinite Jest. I’m so caught
up in the spirit of embarking on a new adventure that I don’t even want to wait
the couple days it would take Amazon to send it to me. Instead, I go right to
the nearest bookstore and buy an undiscounted, full-price copy.

I start reading it that day. Over the course
of the next two months, the book never leaves my nightstand and I slowly but
surely make my way through it. It’s hard going at least initially, but I reach
some sort of hump and get over it and I find myself on the descending side of
this mountain of a book.

My friend asks me periodically how it’s going.
When I’m about 600 pages in, I tell him, You know, it doesn’t even matter how Wallace ends it. He’s built
such an impressive object up to this point that the last 400 pages can be
gobbledygook and it’d still be the most impressive book I’ve ever read. It’s so
full and rich. Sure it might be over-stuffed but it’s one of those things that
is amazing because of its excesses.
You know, like Apocalypse Now. (All
my references were movie-related at the time.)

Of course, the last 400 pages were just as
brilliant as the first 600, and many months later, after finding myself
constantly thinking about it, I had to admit to myself that IJ was definitely my favorite novel of
all time.

I wish there were more audio clips of
him reading from Infinite Jest.

She let me cry for a minute before gently saying,
“For a second I thought something had happened to your parents.”

Her comment pierced the grief-infused haze
that I’d been mired in and I immediately saw the situation through her eyes.
All she knew about David Foster Wallace was what I had told her about him. She
knew he was my favorite author, but that was basically it. She’d never read any
of his writing, and even if she had she wasn’t the type of person who put
artists on some kind of pedestal, and she certainly wouldn’t be moved to such a
display of grief as I was now evincing. She came from a tight-knit family and
keening was reserved for those with whom one shared blood. (Or at least for very
close friends.)

Although I could not stop my flow of tears,
I saw that her (unspoken, merely implied…or rather, inferred (by me)) position was basically correct; it was a little ridiculous that I was
carrying on in such histrionic fashion about the passing of someone with whom I
had never exchanged even a single word. Only someone with a somewhat charmed
life—someone who’d never come within arm’s-length of true disaster, someone
with no direct knowledge of tragedy—could be so moved by the death of a
stranger.

But I was that person, one of the lucky few
who had never known true loss. I’d never had death enter my life; everyone I
loved and cared about was alive and well. My family and friends—all alive and
hale and doing well, which is how it’d always been for as long as I could
remember. I’d never been shattered by the dreadful news of the passing of a
loved one, and my reaction to Wallace’s obituary bespoke not only how important
Wallace had been to me, but my emotional innocence as well.

At my girlfriend’s words, I was confronted
with this other subjectivity here in the midst of my anguish, and I became
extremely self-conscious—something readers of Wallace know a thing or two
about. I saw the blubbering mess she was picturing and I immediately began
apologizing to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I know this is ridiculous.”
I’m still crying, I can’t help it. But I’m saying “sorry” whenever I can summon
up enough breath to do so.

She assured me that it was ok, that she knew
how important he was to me, but I heard the skepticism in her voice. How do I begin
to tell her that he was more than just some author I liked? How to describe for
her that intensely intimate voice of his that made you feel like you were close
friends? His stuff was completely devoid of the pretension and bullshit
flattery and condescension that infect almost everyone else’s writing, even
award-winning, universally respected writing. Reading his books made you feel
like an equal companion of his (though you were still in complete awe of his
intimidating mind).

Added to this, I had listened to enough
interviews to know that the mesmerizing voice he used in his books was really
just his default setting. He talked exactly like he wrote. Nobody else did
that. Even writers of the most gorgeous prose were usually reduced to hollow
shells of their writing when they were interviewed. They would pause awkwardly
and use stilted language and you would usually see them struggling to find the
right word before falling back on safe platitudes and general bromides about
writing or whatever they were talking about. Wallace might pause when faced
with a particularly tough question (they were all tough for him), but when he
opened his mouth out came fully formed and oftentimes revelatory ideas,
precisely articulated in an extraordinary string of sentences. You felt like you
were getting direct access to his brain when he talked, which was the same
feeling you got with his writing. Incredibly, he was able to recreate the
intimate voice of his writing in extemporaneous conversation. It just came
naturally to him. (I’m positive his first drafts were marvels, better than
everyone else’s fifteenth drafts.) So, to me, it was a simple formulation: To
love the writing was to love the author, to love his words was to love the man,
or so it seemed in Wallace’s case.

This was why I was so affected by his
passing, but I couldn’t find a way to express this to my girlfriend, so I just
said “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

I wish I wrote to him because it’s clear
now that there was a pretty good chance I would’ve gotten some sort of
response.

It’s summer of 2007. With IJ still inhabiting my mind, I decide to
tackle the rest of Wallace’s oeuvre. I’m going to read everything. The short
story collections, the essays, even his textbook-like thing on the subject of
infinity. All the in-print stuff is a given, but I also get Signifying Rappers for $6 on the Amazon
marketplace. I also want to read peripheral stuff like interviews and profiles,
so I buy the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction that features his
long interview with Larry McCaffery. I get curious about how IJ was presented to the world when it
first came out in 1996, so I buy a hardcover. (It has a tiny bit of iridescent
foil on the cover like a special edition comic book.) I see a pristine first
edition hardcover of The Broom of the
System for sale, but decide $300 is too much to spend (Me in 2013: Argh).

As I plow through the books all summer long,
I find myself becoming more and more enthralled. I start tracking down audio
interviews, video clips of him on Charlie Rose (I actually buy the DVD ($25)).
I listen to the Bookworm interviews over and over again, absolute treasures. I
listen to muddy recordings of readings and Q&As he did (one of which is so
staticky that he can barely be heard, but I still get through it once).

This is not enough, so I turn to the
internet and find uncollected short stories, book reviews, essays. Also print
interviews, profiles, analyses of his writing. I don’t want to read all this
stuff on my computer monitor so I use my roommate’s printer to create hard
copies. It takes multiple days and many hours to print out everything using the
good ole inkjet. My roommate shakes his head. “So you’ve decided to print out
the internet?” he asks.

I end up with hundreds of printed pages. I
put it all into the biggest binder I can find and separate them by subject with
multi-colored tabs: Short Stories, Interviews, Nonfiction, etc. (A year later I
will add another tab: Tributes.)

I had a blast reading that summer. The best
summer of reading I’ve ever had, and probably ever will.

I wish he did a Bookworm interview for Oblivion (instead of doing that
shallower Connection interview).

“How did he die?” she asked. I looked down
at the crumpled newspaper in front of me—another involuntary action, crumpling
the newspaper into a ball (Get rid of the evidence, it never
happened)—flattened it out and read the rest of the obituary, even though it
was unnecessary because I was pretty sure I knew how it happened. “Found Dead”
is ambiguous and could mean many things: maybe something health-related (not
likely for a still youngish former athlete) or maybe something more lurid like
a homicide. But those possibilities are so out-there I didn’t even entertain
them. “Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself,” I read to my
girlfriend, confirming what I already knew.

In the following days, much was made of the
occurrence of suicide in Wallace’s books, and it’s a point with which it’s hard
to argue. There is a lot of suicide in his books. And Wallace was never
particularly subtle about its inclusion. (He once wrote a story called “Suicide
as a Sort of Present.”) The morbid subject matter is always front and center,
never in the background, and it is sometimes a key plot element in his fiction.
And so of course that’s all everyone fixated on for a while.

I, on the other hand, in the first moments
after learning of his death, thought immediately of a story he did called
“Octet.”

In this story, Wallace sets up a series of
short scenarios he calls “Pop Quizzes” designed to “interrogate” the reader’s
reactions to various heartbreaking set-ups, usually involving a double-bind of
some sort. In one of the stories, a mother gives up custody of her child to her
vindictive but wealthy former husband so that the child will grow up provided
for and taken care of, and the text literally asks, right there on the page,
whether the reader thinks she’s a good mother or not. Another (longer) scenario
involves a man who’s on the outs with his dying father-in-law, but who decides
to bury any animosity he feels and give at least the appearance of being
present and supportive of his wife and her whole side of the family during this
ordeal, and this support extends to his father-in-law who—make no mistake about
it—detests his son-in-law just as fiercely if not even more than his son-in-law
does him, and by doing the “right thing” the man is placed in an extremely
uncomfortable and dishonest position by the end of the story when the old
father-in-law has passed and the man, who alone knows his true feelings, is now
expected to issue words of praise in the father-in-law’s name during some
intimate post-funeral service with the father-in-law’s entire family looking at
him expectantly. And the questions at the end of this “Pop Quiz” make clear the
alienation and helplessness and loneliness the man feels at being put in this
situation.

About halfway through the story, Wallace
breaks some kind of fourth wall and starts talking to the reader. It’s set up
as another “Pop Quiz” (“You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are
attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces…”), but it’s clear that
he’s talking about himself and “interrogating” you, the reader, directly. He
explains that he’s in a swivet because this piece of fiction he’s working
on—the thing you are reading now—just isn’t working. In fact it’s crumbling
before his very eyes. He had intended to write eight short pieces that
“demonstrate some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human
relationships, some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are
faced with having to pay at some point if they ever want truly ‘to be with’
another person instead of just using that person somehow” but that “five of the
eight pieces don’t work at all—meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what
you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or
all three” and he had to throw them out. (The skeletal outlines of a couple of
these “failures” are described in a long footnote.) And now he’s faced with the
last resort of just coming right out and asking the reader if she feels
anything like what he feels, a feeling that he considers “urgent, truly urgent,
something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs about.”
(In a footnote he acknowledges that this sounds pious and melodramatic.) And
he’s also worried that coming right out and addressing the reader like this is
going to look “pathetic and desperate” in the eyes of the reader and that he’ll
look like “just another manipulative pseudopomo bullshit artist who’s trying to
salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a meta-dimension and commenting on the
fiasco itself.” It’s framed as a hypothetical course of action, but in
actuality it’s one of those hypotheticals that are actually real propositions
(“Suppose I were to ask you out…”), and it’s clear that Wallace is trying to
see “whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the
same way [he does].”

Or rather, it’s clear that that’s what he
was trying to get at now. Back then, in
1999 when the story came out, all evidence points to people taking that story
as an amusing little bit of “S.O.P. metatext,” even though he expressly tells
you in the story that that is not what he is trying to do. But,
y’know, nobody took him seriously because…well, irony, man.

In fact, there always seemed to be some
unbridgeable gap between what Wallace intended to convey with his fiction and
what a lot of readers took away from it. For example, he said over and over
that he considered IJ to be a sad
book, and yet wave after wave of admirers extolled the book’s humor. Discussing
his book of stories Brief Interviews With
Hideous Men (in which “Octet” appears), he went so far to say that
“everybody thought [Infinite Jest]
was very funny, which was of course nice, but it was also kind of frustrating,
and I designed this one so that nobody is going to escape the fact that this is
sad.” Taking that into account, there is a certain sadness in reading the blurbs
for BIWHM that call the book “bitingly
funny” and “often funny,” with other critics proclaiming “it is fun, and often
very funny” and “outrageously funny” and that it’s “damn funny stuff,” etc. There
always seemed to be some misunderstanding or misinterpretation of his work,
even by those who praised them.

This is what I thought of moments after
learning he had died. He was a writer who always took sadness as his subject.
Always, even when people thought he was trying to be funny. But as sad and
horrifying as this is to admit, it was like you couldn’t really see what he was
saying until he killed himself. It was only then that you knew for sure that he
really wasn’t kidding around with what he was writing about. He wasn’t doing
that thing that so many other inferior writers do, trading on some general
sense of “sadness” that often gets turned into cloying sentimentality in an
attempt to extract a few tears from the reader, but only in the service of a
crowd-pleasing redemptive ending. Sadness is also commonly deployed to elevate
one’s opinion of the author: “Oh look how clever he is, pointing out all the
ways the world is shit.” Both methods flatter the reader’s idea of “oh, there’s
something wrong with the world, how sad,” and both end with the author and
reader going their separate ways, basically happy and content, leaving the book
behind, forgotten, as they go merrily on being consumers or well-adjusted
citizens or whatever. Basically, it’s really easy to pay lip service to an idea
of intrinsic human sadness and that’s why it’s really hard to take seriously sometimes.
But Wallace was utterly serious about it. When he was making every attempt to
get at an almost indefinable sadness in “Octet” and desperately querying the
reader about her take on it, he wasn’t playing games. He was truly trying to
describe a sadness he honestly felt. This wasn’t just some literary
construction for him. And it’s impolitic to say this, and the implications are
truly horrific, but we know he genuinely felt this sadness because he killed
himself. We later found out about his clinical depression, the previous suicide
attempts, the decades-long battle with his own biochemistry, but I know at the
moment I found out about his death, it appeared that he had finally succumbed
to the ineluctable sadness he had been trying to describe with nearly every
word he wrote. It pained me to think of how acutely he must have felt this
sadness, and it also shattered me to think of how his attempts to convey this
sadness he knew so intimately had often been misconstrued, even by his most
careful readers. As I sat there sobbing at news of his death, I felt all his
themes of sadness and loneliness crystallize and take the form of a sharp point
that proceeded to stab me in the heart.

How
could his fans not know he was suicidal? an outside observer might ask
today. Considering all those stories
about suicide? How could you not realize he was dangerously depressed? After
all, he wrote a story called “The Depressed Person” that casually name-dropped
dozens of antidepressants. How could you not see it?

We didn’t see it. We had no idea. I don’t
know why. It’s not that we didn’t believe him when he wrote about the sadness…that was something he enabled us to
recognize all too clearly. Perhaps conditioned by the way other writers
operate, we just didn’t think it was so firmly entrenched inside of him. Maybe
we figured his books were having the same palliative effect on him that they
were having on us. For those who loved his books, his prose perfectly limned
the despairing sadness that was an intrinsic part of life while at the same
time acting as a shield against it; by being so erudite, so insightful, so good, his books made us feel less alone
and better equipped to navigate our own “skull-sized kingdoms.” But apparently,
it was not enough for him.

If we knew the ordeal he was going through,
I guarantee we would’ve done something. I can picture a large contingent of his
fans descending on his house in Claremont, putting themselves at his service,
trying to give him some measure of comfort, holding candlelight vigils outside
his home. I’m being 100% serious. Wallace fans are some of the most com-/passionate
people in the world. You think we would’ve just sat back and done nothing if we
knew he was in such constant pain? There’s no chance. We would’ve gone to California
based on nothing more than the slim hope that we could do something for him, repay
him in some small way for all he had given us. And there’s no doubt he would’ve
hated it, he would’ve fucking hated it, all of us showing up unannounced like
that. All that attention on him when he so eloquently made the case against
solipsism and the cult of “me-me-me.” God, he would’ve hated a crowd of adoring
and concerned fans outside his house. (Probably anyone would, actually.) But we
wouldn’t have been able to help ourselves. Of that I am sure.

I wish he had felt well enough to write
that piece on Obama and rhetoric.

It is 2010. I am in a bus terminal, waiting
for a friend due to arrive any minute. I’m passing the time by reading Understanding David Foster Wallace,
recently rereleased by South Carolina Press in a new, updated edition.

I’m sitting on one of those long benches. On
the other end of the bench is a guy around my age. He’s also reading a book.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the blue cover first. I look up and see
the unmistakable cinder block heft, and I recognize those all-too-familiar one
thousand, seventy-nine pages.

I must admit, I’m more than a little
excited. It’s the first time I’ve seen an IJ
“out in the wild.” (I live in a rural area and I hear they’re usually
indigenous to NYC subways.) I don’t even consider not talking to the guy.

I make that half-reaching gesture people use
to get someone’s attention and softly say, “Hey.” The guy looks up. I nod at
the book in his hands and grin. “Infinite Jest.” I hold up my own book,
cementing our solidarity.

For his part, he doesn’t look too taken
aback. He asks to see my book and flips through it, gauging his own interest. I
look at his copy and notice the first bookmark (there are two, of course) is
about 150 pages in. I ask him if this is his first time reading it and he says
it is. I tell him it’s my favorite novel by far, gushing a little. He nods
soberly and hands back my book. I ask him how he’s enjoying it and he says he
likes it so far. He’s obviously not yet at the evangelical stage I am about
Wallace and IJ. He has not really
smiled during this interaction and I get the impression he’s one of those
people who takes himself way too seriously, but I don’t care because I’m just
happy to finally meet a random stranger who is reading the book.

My friend’s bus arrives and I see him
disembark. I gather my things and stand up. Before I leave, I say goodbye to
the guy and tell him that I hope he enjoys the rest of the book. The last image
I have is of him reading IJ on that
bench. I wonder whether he finished it, and, if so, what his thoughts were.

Some
things I’ve hated about the last five years: I hate how DFW has been used as
a punchline for stupid jokes or as a sort of shorthand for describing a certain
kind of highly self-aware writing but in a really reductive and usually sneery
way. I hate how people who haven’t read IJ
think it’s just some repetitive, too-clever-by-half, overly cerebral commentary
on addiction and entertainment and whatever. I’m mildly annoyed at how people
have glommed onto This Is Water and
seem to know little else of Wallace’s work. I’m even more annoyed that people
stay away from Infinite Jest and that
other fans recommend reading “around it” or “building up to it.” (Would you
have someone listen to Dirty Work, Steel Wheels, and A Bigger Bang before finally giving them Exile on Main St.? Just give them the best stuff immediately, I
say.) I hate the jokes (“How do you
know someone’s read Infinite Jest?
Don’t worry, he’ll tell you”). I hate that he’s gone.

Some
things I’ve loved about the last five years: I love seeing all the stuff we
might never have been able to see: letters, manuscript pages, syllabi. I loved
getting The Pale King, even if it
wasn’t quite in the form we would’ve liked. All the audio interviews that were
released because of the more widespread interest. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Infinite Summer. But mainly all
the posthumous writing. Though I will state what to me is the obvious: I would
trade every bit of Wallace’s writing we got post-’08 for him just to still be alive
and healthy again. And not necessarily because I want new work. Even if he
didn’t write another word, even if no more books were published, I think I’d
still derive some measure of comfort knowing that he was out in the world, just
living his life.

It’s hard to know how to end something like
this. I have a strong suspicion these last few paragraphs will just trail off
at some point. I’d feel uncomfortable making some grand final statement like
“David Foster Wallace meant ______ to me, and always will” or something like
that. It’s hard to even encapsulate how important he and his works are to me in
under 6,000 words. A simple way of putting it is that he’s changed my life for
the better. That’s a zero-BS declaration. Just reading Infinite Jest is like getting a solid liberal arts education. If
you look up every word you don’t know and wikipedia every reference or concept you
don’t understand, then Eggers is right: You will come out of it a better
person. I’m not particularly intelligent, but if I hadn’t read IJ, I would be a lot dumber than I am
now, that’s for sure.

While it’s true that he’s fundamentally
changed the way I look at the world, some of the ways he’s affected my life
aren’t what you would call Profound or Earth-shattering. I don’t eat lobster
anymore. And I’ve turned into somewhat of an amateur SNOOT. Inspired by
Wallace’s passion for language, I’ve hit the books and now know much more about
grammar than I used to. I mean, take a gander at that paragraph supra where I’m writing about preparing to
tackle IJ.You can see how my writing was infected with solecisms
and general carelessness before I read that book. There are dangling participles (“After doing a little
Googling, Wallace captures my attention”), super casualisms (“Anyways”), careless
placement of modifiers (“Wallace, on the other hand, has only written two
novels”), noun-pronoun agreement problems (“What author would you run out and
get their book if it came out today?”), s-v a.p. (“but it’s one of those things
that is amazing because of its
excesses”), wrongness coupled with awkwardness (“who is inordinately more
well-versed than me in all the art forms”), etc. While this new-found awareness
can sometimes result in a kind of writerly paralysis, I like to think that
ultimately I’m better for it.

There were some things I wanted to talk
about earlier but wasn’t able to blend them into the piece in a natural way. I
wanted to say how grateful I was that I read the bulk of his work—especially IJ—before 2008. Everyone reading his
stuff now for the first time probably can’t stop the alarm bells going off every
time suicide is mentioned, and I really don’t think that’s the ideal way to
read the books. I also wanted to talk a little about the weirdness of learning
about his death from a newspaper of all things, a local paper no less. This was
2008, not 1908. The internet was up and running. I guess everyone found out
Saturday night…it must have been reported by various outlets. How did I miss
it?

I really don’t know how to end this. I will
say I’m constantly reminded of him. I’ll see an unusual word and remember that
I first encountered it in one of his books. Pynchon’s book comes out next week
and I only got into Pynchon because of him. Hardly a week goes by when he isn’t
mentioned in some book review or another. Nadal just won the U.S. Open, which
set off an explosion of associations.

About Me

So I'm officially an author. My book is called Deadly Reflections, and is available on the Kindle Store right this second. I encourage anyone who likes a good love story with paranormal aspects to check it out!